King Lear (Godard, 1987): Cine Lumiere, 6.10pm
This is a 35mm presentation and part of the Jean-Luc Godard season at Cine Lumiere. You can find all the details here. The screening will be preceded by a talk by Professor Garin Dowd (University of West London).
New Yorker review:
The cinema is born of two things, invention and sacrifice. On Easter
Sunday, Jean-Luc Godard—as Professor Pluggy, a solitary inventor
striving to reinvent the image—makes the petals pop back onto the
flowers of spring through the miracle of reverse photography and expires
from the effort. Thus is the cinema reborn, the natural order
restored—and thus, in the first image of this new cinema, Cordelia
(Molly Ringwald) dies, her body stretched on a boulder by the shores of
Lake Geneva, as, with his back to her, Lear (Burgess Meredith) beholds
the wonders of nature that have made it so. The cinema is born of three
things: invention, sacrifice, and mourning. This 1987 film is Godard’s
maximally pressurized condensation of his great themes: his manifesto of
the image; a lost world of artistic culture, and, of course, of cinema;
the hazardous bonds of paternity. The casting alone proclaims the
magnitude of his ambition: not only Meredith and Ringwald but Norman
Mailer and his daughter Kate, Julie Delpy, Woody Allen, and, decisively,
Peter Sellars as William Shakespeare, Jr., the Fifth, sent by the Queen
of England to rediscover the works of his ancestor, which were lost
along with all culture in the wake of Chernobyl. This comic setup mocks
the notion of filming “King Lear” as if it were a ready-made screenplay.
There is no film of “King Lear”—indeed, no act of art—that is not a
rediscovery, no image of nature that is not a resurrection.
Richard Brody
Here (and above) is an extract.
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